wind blown sand dune ridge

We spent 2 nights back in civilisation, which was weird, slightly intrusive, but extremely luxurious and convenient after 4 nights in the bush. We all had our first shower in days, but most of us kept wearing the same dirty clothes in protest of being clean on a week long camping trip. We indulged in meat pies, and eating meals that werent cooked over fire coals, and then the first night in Swakopmund went to the bar Rafters for some socializing. It was Tuesday, so not so busy, but a group of Eastern Canadians involved in oil rigs kept the bar quite alive with them buying basically everyone else in the bar most of their drinks. We realized later the one sleezebag paying for them was just a big creeper, trying to chat the girls up. My two personal bodyguards, the Australians, decided he was overstepping his boundaries when they caught him trying to squeeze my butt, so after paying the bouncers to kick him out, tried to coax him into a taxi to leave. But, he was drunk, and made a horrible decision when he tried to swing a punch at Griffo. The other aussie, Jimmy, happens to be an ultimate fighter, a very good one in fact, and even though the guy was pretty big and fat, had him on the ground screaming like a girl in fetal position within seconds. The guy was fine, in Jimmy’s defense, but even one hit from him probably did some serious damage.

We laughed about it the next day, since we probably could have just left to take care of the situation, but at the time the way things went definitely seemed like the most obvious solution. Life goes on, so instead of feeling bad about it we went dune boarding on these huge sand dunes only 5 minutes from the center of town. You just ride a plank of wood down, head first on your stomach, and hope to make it to the bottome before becoming separated from your board and sand rashing your stomach and arms in a cloud of dust. The latter happened more often, at least for me. Griffo and Steve were stars at it, and at one point when a line of quad bikes were driving past the bottom of the dune we were surfing, bombed down all the way down to cross their path but missing the last bike by a few seconds.

gnarly trees in deadsvlei

We spent 2 days at the really big dunes in Sossusvlei, which are even bigger and made up of red sand. We entered the park around 3 pm, and instead of leaving at sunset when the gates closed, got our car stuck on a 4×4 track and, after very little effort, decided we just had to camp overnight and leave when the gates opened again the next morning. We dune boarded some of those dunes too, but broke both boards since these tuffs of grash and bushes are scattered throughout the bottoms of the dunes and both Griffo and Steve managed to crash straight into some. Good thing Steve was even alive, since he hit one at probably 80km/h and then got thrown around like a rag doll another 50m.

happy us 🙂

We were told that people had been looking for us the night before, but managed to sneak out the gates without anyone noticing our car plates which they had on file as missing. We stopped by Sessriem Canyon on the way out, a beautiful deep canyon that looks like its made of man-mixed gravel, and then spent the afternoon in Solitaire, a town thats basically just one big parking lot with a gas station, a convenience store, a restaurant, and a bakery. Needless to say we spent a couple hours at the bakery, eating the most delicious pies, and even though it was Sunday – an illegal day to sell alcohol, convinced the restaurant to sell us 3 six-packs of beer.